The Disco Biscuits celebrated Halloween at Worcester, MA’s Palladium on Friday and Saturday, a beloved venue where the Philadelphia-bred group hosted a New Year’s Eve show in 2000 and even filmed an official DVD in 2004. As promised, on Halloween proper the group crafted a live, improvised score to Tim Burton’s 1988 classic Beetlejuice. The band used their first set to jam along with the enduring goth-camp movie while dressed as Beetlejuice characters, sampling Danny Elfman’s original theme song along the way. They also nodded to the original Beetlejuice soundtrack by sampling and riffing on Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jump In The Line (Shake Senora)” during the appropriate sequences. It was the latest in a series of movie nights, a tradition that began on December 31, 1999 when the Disco Biscuits performed to Akira.
After wrapping up Beetlejuice on Saturday, the Disco Biscuits returned for an improv-heavy second that that kicked off with a run from “42” into their debut take on John Carpenter’s Halloween theme, “Cyclone” and a version of “Morph Dusseldorf” that sampled Michael Jackson’s Halloween-appropriate “Thriller.” A standalone “Shelby Rose” closed the set, but the Biscuits then returned for an encore run from “Fire Will Exchange” back into “42.”
A few days earlier, the group teased the Halloween theme at Hartford, CT’s Infinity Music Hall on Thursday during “Shem-Rah Boo.” The horror film was one of several options the Biscuits asked fans to vote on for the Halloween movie night, with Beetlejuice ultimately winning; Halloweentown, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sleepy Hollow and The Nightmare Before Christmas were the other selections on the ballot.
The Disco Biscuits will kick off a six-show run at Ardmore, PA’s The Ardmore Music Hall on December 14. For more on the group’s current plans, be sure to read our recent feature interview with Marc Brownstein.
